SAMUEL - Week 1

This week, we are embarking on a new, exciting adventure into one of the most fascinating parts of the bible!

Having explored Joshua and the arrival of the Israelites in the Promised Land, and the times of the Judges, we are now moving on to explore 1&2 Samuel, which tells of the transition into the rule of Kings over Israel.

These two texts (originally just one text but split at the time of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) offer something for everyone!

If you love getting stuck into great stories and narratives displaying the character of God – these books are for you!

If you want to look at some prominent biblical characters to see the nature of humanity’s connection with God – these books are for you!

If you are captivated by big theological questions leaping out of the texts of the bible and into our own world – these books are for you!

If you enjoy navigating the cultural and historical contexts of the world behind these biblical texts – these books are for you!

We’re going to spend a while reading through 1&2 Samuel and see what treasures we uncover along the way.

For today, and by way of beginning this journey, we’ll have a brief introduction into these texts and then have a look at some key themes that appear early in the story, that we might have encountered already this week (if you’re reading along).

Introduction to Samuel

If you remember back before our sojourn in Mark’s gospel, we had been reading about the Judges. Israel was a tribal society, facing threats of neighbouring groups like the Philistines, without any centralised leadership. A line was repeated throughout – “In those days there was no king...”).

As we start 1 Samuel, we are on course to see the rise of the monarchy in Israel, the solution to the problems explored in the book of Judges. In the simplest terms, there are three main characters in this story :

Samuel: a Prophet who will anoint (familiar language now?) the kings

Saul: The first King of Israel

David: The second king of Israel, and arguably one of the most significant characters in the whole Hebrew Bible.

The text offers a mixture of narrative history, theological reflection and biography. It is sometimes considered part of Deuteronomistic history – an idea which suggests that Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings are one connected narrative, potentially from one source, inspired by the theology of Deuteronomy.

First proposed by Martin Noth in 1943, who argued that a single author/editor (the “Deuteronomist”), writing during the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE), compiled this history to explain Israel’s national downfall as the result of covenant unfaithfulness.  The Deuteronomist used earlier sources but interpreted Israel's history through Deuteronomic theology.

Already, then, we have an interesting lens through which to approach this text. We’ve just been reading Joshua and Judges, so perhaps it might be easier for us to identify the features of the text which led some to that conclusion.

Key themes in Samuel

There are a number of key themes that arise in Samuel. They are broad and big, but some vital elements of both Jewish and Christian theology find a root in these stories.

In the coming weeks, we’ll encounter key themes like Kingship and Covenant, True Leadership, Worship and God’s Presence, Sin and Mercy  and more!

But even just in the first few chapters, we’ve come across some important themes:

God’s Sovereignty and Reversal of Expectations

The opening of the whole Samuel narrative is the story of the miraculous conception and birth of Samuel. It’s a story we see a few times across the bible – woman who is ‘barren’ becoming pregnant; Sarah (Genesis 11–21), Rebekah (Genesis 25:21), Rachel (Genesis 29–30), Samson’s unnamed mother (Judges 13), and Elizabeth (Luke 1). These stories speak of God as the bringer of life and use a miraculous change in circumstance to reveal God’s sovereignty.

These accounts also serve to pre-empt the life of someone important. The children of those women were Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samson and John the Baptist. So we should be expecting big things from Samuel!

The Rise of Prophetic Authority

We start 1 Samuel 3 with this statement;

The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

This sets the scene for the emergence of a prophet. Then we have the story of the calling of Samuel which portrays the essence of the prophet as one who hears God. The whole mishap with Eli is a nice picture of learning to recognise God’s voice – for some of us it takes a lifetime, Samuel manages it in just one night!

Not only is prophetic authority on the rise, we are presented an interesting picture over the course of Samuel which reiterates that the kings are subject to God’s law and not above it. It is Samuel as a prophet who holds King Saul to account. Later, it is the prophet Nathan who confronts King David.

The Presence and Power of God

In this early part of the story, the presence of God is marked by the ark of the covenant. What we find in 1 Samuel 4, however, is not a display of God’s power and presence in a positive way for Israel, but the impact of the absence of God’s presence.

The ark is captured by the Philistines (4:11), which marks a crisis of national identity and divine absence-  the naming of “Ichabod” meaning "The glory has departed," (4:21–22).

We should remember this as the introduction to the ark as the presence, as on the other end of 2 Samuel we begin to see plans for the temple, a permanent dwelling place for God, to take place.

There is so much more to get into, and the story is only going to get more and more gripping!